Shattered Dreams: A Midnight Dragonfly Novel (32 page)

Stepping into a pair of his gym shorts, I realized that even wrenched as tight as they would go, they wouldn’t stay up. Fortunately I didn’t really need them, not when the shirt was longer than most of my dresses. So after running my fingers through my hair and slicking it back from my face, I turned toward the door leading to the main room—and caught myself in the mirror.

Twenty-four hours. That’s all that had elapsed since I’d been with Chase on his sofa. We’d played
Halo
. He’d kissed me. I’d kissed him back. We’d—

I silenced the thought, didn’t want to go back.

The girl in the mirror was a stranger, the one with the finger-combed hair and shower-smeared makeup, wearing the shirt of a guy she didn’t know and the necklace of a mother she didn’t remember, legs bare.

Bare. It was the perfect word. Everything I’d ever believed in had been stripped away, leaving me here, now, like this. Alone with a stranger—who looked at me like he’d known me forever, but wished that he hadn’t.

His apartment was small, three boxy rooms connected by a narrow hallway along one side. The front room had a couch and a television, a bunch of milk crates stacked to form a desk. On top sat a very new-looking laptop. A collection of black-and-white photographs hung on two of the four walls. There was a door to the bathroom, and a small hall which led first to the bedroom, then to the kitchen. I found it odd that the kitchen was in the back, but a lot of the older buildings in New Orleans had a similar layout. The apartment was on the second floor. From the bar below leaked the strains of a saxophone.

After a few minutes and deep breaths, I found him kicked back on the ratty sofa watching a football game on a surprisingly small TV, and something inside of me shifted. I had so many questions and couldn’t help but think he had the answers.

Nothing prepared me for him to glance my way. He didn’t smile, not with his mouth, but the silver of his eyes gleamed. “Better?”

“Much. Thank you.”

He rolled to his feet and headed toward me. He’d changed out of his wet, dirty clothes from the river, but he’d let me clean up first. “There’s some roast beef in the fridge if you’re hungry,” he said, and then he was gone, slipping by me and vanishing into the bathroom.

I heard the door close, the water come on, and knew that he, too, had taken off his clothes.

Uncomfortable, I hurried to the kitchen, where a TV tray and bar stool served as table and chair, and a wood door led to a small balcony. In the white fridge that looked straight out of the fifties, I found myself smiling at the collection of fruit and yogurt and sandwich fixings, orange juice, milk, and beer.

The old Trinity would have reached for the juice. But the memory of the tequila came rushing back, those few sweet moments when I’d been with the guy from Texas and everything else had fallen away.

That’s what I wanted. For all the craziness to fall away, go away. To not think about any of it. For me to just … be. The new Trinity was tired of sitting in that tight little box, with everyone watching and judging.

I reached for the beer, found a bottle opener and flipped the top, took a long, deep swallow, let the cool, bitter liquid slide like an elixir down my throat.

“You sure about that?”

I spun around and found Dylan in the doorway, a white towel around his shoulders, unfastened jeans low on his hips—and his chest absolutely bare.

“You’re fast,” I whispered … yeah, like an idiot.

“Only when it’s called for,” he said, closing in on me.

I stepped back. It was automatic. My legs bumped the cabinets.

And he kept right on coming.

Mouth dry, I gulped another big swallow of beer.

He took the bottle from my hands. “Come on. Get your stuff.”

My chin went up. An odd little panic spurted through me. “No.”

He stopped inches from me, standing so close he had to look down to see me. I’d never really realized how tall he was, not until that moment, when I had to tilt my chin to see him.

Less than an hour before, we’d been sprawled together on the slope of the river. Our legs had tangled. Our mouths had—

You asked me to,
he’d said.
After you started breathing again.

Shock did weird, weird things to my sense of … everything.

“Hiding doesn’t get you anywhere,” he said in that soft, oddly hypnotic voice of his, the one that sounded like it should come from a magician or shaman, someone wise and knowing—not an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old guy with dark, edgy eyes and an apartment above a bar in the French Quarter.

I shifted, worked hard to keep my breath steady. “Who says I’m hiding?”

“You’re here, aren’t you?”

He knew. God help me, he knew. Everything. He knew why I’d been alone by the river—and he knew why I didn’t want to go home.

Feeling reckless, I took the bottle from his hands and indulged in another long, slow sip. “Maybe this is where I want to be.”

In his eyes, the faintest flicker registered. Surprise, maybe. Curiosity.

Compassion.

Whatever it was, it was enough. Enough to draw me closer, to make me want … more. He hadn’t turned away. He hadn’t stepped back. He’d pulled me from the river. He was here. He was now. I wanted to feel that again, that safety. That sense that everything was okay, that everything was going to be okay. I wanted what I’d lost.

“Maybe
…” Something dark and reckless whispered through me, and for the first time in my life I went with it. I stepped into Jim Fourcade’s son and pushed up on my toes, lifted my face—and brushed my lips against his.

At first he did nothing, just stood there removed somehow, even though my body was pressed to his. Then I slid a hand to the back of his neck and shifted my mouth, sprinkling small kisses against the corner of his.

His hand caught mine. Hard. He dragged it away from him, physically stepped back. Even before he spoke, I saw the warning in the lines of his face.

“Careful, little girl. You don’t want to start a game without knowing who you’re playing with.”

“Don’t tell me what I don’t want,” I practically hissed. “That’s all anyone has done my whole life. Don’t let anyone know. Don’t let anyone see. Don’t ask questions. Don’t make waves. Don’t take chances—” I’d tried. I’d tried so damn hard to be good. Be perfect. To do and not do as I was told. To please my grandmother. “And look where that’s gotten me.”

He had the good grace to wince. “You’re not thinking straight.”

“How do you know that? Maybe that’s exactly what I’m doing, for the first time in my life.”

“Trinity—”

“What? You don’t like what you see?”

His eyes darkened. He flicked a glance down along my body, slowly back up. “Do I look like someone who doesn’t like what he sees?”

I swallowed, not sure why his rejection stung so badly. “Then what?”

The second the answer to my question hit me, I stepped back, broke all contact. “Omigod.” Humiliation made me want to run.
“You think I’m a freak.”
The words were raw, hoarse. In my desperation to find my way back to safety and warmth, I’d jumped to conclusions. I’d been wrong. As with Chase, Dylan knew. And as with Chase, he was stepping back. “You saw me running, didn’t you? You saw me run from something that wasn’t there. You saw me—”

He moved so fast I didn’t have time to breathe. His hands came down on my upper arms, and he pulled me back to him. “I don’t think you’re a freak.”

His voice was as raw, as hoarse, as mine. “Then—”

“Goddamnit.” That was the only warning I got.

TWENTY-SEVEN

He dragged me toward him, his hand finding the side of my face for a fractured second before his mouth came down against mine, and all the pieces from before, the jagged slivers that hadn’t fit together, settled wordlessly into place.

Before, on the riverbank, when I’d drifted through the darkness, it had been him pulling me back, him suffusing me with warmth and light. He’d put his mouth to mine and given me his breath. He’d brought me back.

I felt it all over again, this time with the fragile awareness of a hazy dream. I felt his mouth slant over mine. I felt his arms gather me close, his body against mine. I felt his recklessness—and utter restraint.

I felt little parts of me breaking away, even as new parts of me bloomed, and fused.

I felt him walking me backward, toward the wall.

Or maybe that was the hall to his bedroom.

I didn’t know, didn’t care, couldn’t think. Just knew that—

He pulled back so abruptly I staggered, swayed against him. His breath was as hard as his body, his eyes dark and drenched with something I didn’t come close to understanding. Even his voice was … obliterated.
“This isn’t what you want.”

I hung there, in his arms but a world away, not moving even as the space between us stretched and morphed into something ugly and unrecognizable. “Dylan—”

“You’re lashing out,” he said, his voice all quiet and dangerous. “Using me like that kid in the bar.”

I felt myself go absolutely, horribly still.

“But it’s not going to change anything,” he said, and again his eyes glowed like burnished silver. “It’s not going to make what happened earlier today go away.”

Somehow I made myself move. Somehow I made myself back away from him, sever every sliver of contact. He knew.
Everything.
“You were there,” I whispered again.

His nostrils flared.

“Your father…”

“Still has friends,” he said.

Which meant that Dylan knew about Detective Jackson and the evidence against me, that I’d been hauled in for questioning, and that Chase had walked away.

“So you took it upon yourself to follow me?” It took every ounce of control I had not to slap my hands against his chest, and shove him as hard as I could. “That was you on Bourbon Street, wasn’t it?” It was what I should have asked all along, if not for the fog of tequila. “In the bar! My God—you idiot! You scared me half to death!” That’s why I’d twisted around and started to run, tripped and rolled into the river. “If you hadn’t been sneaking around—”

The sudden glitter to his eyes stopped me cold.

“Then your fun and games would be all over.” Reaching around me, he plucked the beer bottle from my hand—I hadn’t even realized I was still holding it—and brought it over the sink, turned it upside down. “If I hadn’t been there, you’d be dead.”

I wanted to hate him for that, for yanking that veil of safety from me, for making everything real again. And maybe I did. He was right. If he had not been following me, I could have died. Right there in that river, I could have sunk, and no one would have known I was gone, until it was too late.

“Maybe it wouldn’t have happened at all,” I said, as much to myself as to him. “Maybe if you hadn’t been following me in the first place, I would have stayed in that bar—”

“With the guy that was all over you? Did you even get his name?”

I shot him a look that so said
go to hell
. “Does it matter?”

He stepped closer, shrinking the pale green walls of the kitchen around us. “You have no idea, do you?” His voice was quiet, rough. “No idea how … special you are.”

I tensed, felt the whisper of that one word,
special,
clear down to my soul.

“Or how dangerous the game can be,” he went on, boxing me in between his half-dressed body and the counter. His arm was inked. I couldn’t make it all out, just something round and webbed. “But my father knows. He’s seen it before. And he’s not about to let what happened to your mother happen to you.”

I stood frozen, struggling to so much as breathe, staring up at this guy I’d known less than a day, but who seemed to be a walking encyclopedia of my life.

“So what?” I asked, using sass to mask the quick lash of vulnerability. “He appointed you my bodyguard?”

His eyes met mine. “I wish it was just your body.”

The words, the absolute lack of any emotion in his voice, chilled me.

But then he was turning from me, dragging the towel from around his shoulders as he headed back toward his bedroom. “Now get your things, little girl. It’s time to go home.”

I’m not sure which punched harder—little girl, or
home.

Charging after him, I caught up with him as he was grabbing a T-shirt from an old dresser. “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Tired of the job already?”

“This isn’t about me,” he said, pulling the dark gray cotton over his head and hiding all traces of the ink on his bicep. “I would have thought you’d realized that by now.”

I lifted my chin, squared my shoulders, did everything I could to pretend this was perfectly normal. But the truth of the matter was, I’d never been alone with a guy in his bedroom before. “Why do you call me little girl?”

Slowly he turned toward me. “What would you rather I call you?”

“My name is Trinity.”

He reached for his wallet and shoved it into his back pocket. “Trinity Rose.”

The shiver was automatic. “How do you know that?”

He pushed past me, toward the hall leading to the front room. But he stopped two steps away from me, and turned. “You were the one sent away. You were the one scrubbed of your memories—not me.”

I had to make myself breathe. “Then don’t send me away now,” I whispered as more pieces slipped together.
Dylan knew. Dylan, this veritable stranger who’d gone into the river after me, who’d pulled me back and kept me safe, knew. So much more than anyone had told me.

He hesitated, one foot in his surprisingly tidy bedroom, one foot in the narrow little hall. “They’re looking for you. Your aunt—”

“Please,” I said before he could finish. “Let me stay. Just for a little while. I’m tired.” Confused. “You won’t even know I’m here.”

*   *   *

“Tea?”

“Tea. It’ll help you sleep.”

Standing next to the stark bed that looked more like a cot, I took the smooth white mug and glanced at the brown liquid inside. “I don’t think I need any help.”

Dylan stepped back, lifted a shoulder. “Your mother liked it. Thought you might want some, too.”

He so played dirty. After shooting him a quick look to let him know that I was on to his game, I brought the mug to my lips and drew in a slow sip. The liquid was hot, bitter. “What’s even in this?” I asked with a scrunched-up face.